Bitters

An ingredient measured in drops

Bitters are made by steeping barks, roots, seeds, peel and spice in high-strength spirit and concentrating the bitterness and aroma that result. Because they are concentrated, they are measured in dashes: a few drops in a finished drink, a volume small enough to ignore, and still enough to change what the glass smells like. On their own they are punishingly bitter, and they are not intended to be drunk that way.

A note of history

In the nineteenth century these bitter tinctures were widely sold under medicinal pretexts, each house with its own recipe and claims. What survived into the bar was the seasoning. A definition printed in an American newspaper in 1806 described a cocktail as spirits, sugar, water and bitters — which is, read today, the shape of an Old Fashioned. Bitters were not added to the form later; they were one of its original four parts.

Aromatic bitters

The aromatic style is the common one: gentian and other bitter roots carrying warm spice such as cinnamon and clove, dark in colour and dense in aroma. In the Manhattan they sand down the border between whiskey and sweet red vermouth. The Champagne Cocktail puts them on a sugar cube and lets the bubbles carry the scent upward. In the Sazerac they are layered against the anise of an absinthe rinse.

Orange and peach

Orange bitters are built on dried citrus peel: lighter in bitterness, brighter in aroma, and most at home in stirred gin or vermouth drinks such as the Martinez. Peach bitters all but vanished from the market in the middle of the twentieth century and returned only recently; the Derby is one of the few recipes to give them the leading part.

Using them

Think of bitters as salt and pepper. They supply no body of their own; they connect what is already in the glass and give the nose a signal before the first sip. A few working principles:

• Add them early — with the sugar and the spirit, so that stirring or shaking distributes them.
• Err low — in a small drink, one dash either way is audible.
• Or finish on top — dashed over the surface or the foam they go straight to the nose, which is a different effect from stirring them in.

For the bitter aperitifs and amari that work on the same axis, see vermouth and aperitifs; for the base spirit, see whisky.